Premiere: Faith Evans Ruch begs for forgiveness on ‘I’m Yours’

“Being compassionate is so much more important than being right,” soul-pop singer Faith Evans Ruch concedes, meditating upon her new single “I’m Yours,” in which she avows “I didn’t mean to do you wrong,” following a blow-out with her boyfriend. Premiering exclusively today, the gleaming horn-driven mid-tempo witnesses Ruch reconciling her lover’s feelings over her own pride. “Your love is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she later murmurs. “I love you more everyday.”

The song, technically the third single from her impending new album, appropriately titled Lessons in Falling (out Oct. 13), skitters along like Nancy Sinatra and Joss Stone, with Ruch’s own rare strength and inflection thrusting the story forward. “[It] is an apology/love letter to the man I was in love with,” she tells B-Sides & Badlands about the song (officially dropping tomorrow), which was written on the dock of the bay at her parent’s home in lower Alabama early last year. “The day before I’d left to go down there from Memphis for a visit, [he and I] had had a fight that I thought was petty, but that was obviously really bothering him. I was letting my pride get the best of me and instead of apologizing, I was trying to stand my ground that it wasn’t a big deal and he should just ‘get over it.'”

The subsequent seven and a half hour drive “down to the gulf,” as she recalls, gave her ample reflection time. “I thought, ‘damn, Faith, you sure are being hard headed over this. You love this person with all your heart, so even if you think that him getting upset was silly, don’t you think that maybe it’s more important that it hurt him than whether or not you think it should have?'”

The song quickly sprung from her pen, baring her heart and soul. “I just wanted him to know that I realized that I was wrong and that I loved him so much more than I loved my ego,” she says. Even as the words were first nurtured, she imagined the vibrant, shimmering horn sections, scrawling in her mind’s eye. “I was writing it as a love letter or Valentine that I imagined exploding with glitter and confetti ⎯⎯ I guess that’s how I imagine that exploding from your heart kinda love ⎯⎯ and that mental image was best represented by some funky horns.”

“Bottom line is this: If you really love someone, you gotta set your pride aside,” the singer, working out of Memphis, concludes. On “I’m Yours,” her message rings out loud and clear: from the sparkling melody to Ruch’s expressive and heartfelt proficiency. “Here I am baby, I’m yours / I ain’t going to let you down,” she grants on the slung-back hook.

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Jason Scott

Editor-in-Chief of the Badlands, spinning those B-Sides. Love Parks & Rec. Addicted to high-priced coffee drinks, alt-country and synth-pop, and never know when to quit. Got a cat named Jake--and she doesn't like you very much.